It is up to you to clean house if you have a small separate /boot partition or / is full because Ubuntu is not going to know which older kernel(s) you need if a new one does not work for some reason. Can you still boot one of the earlier kernels?

That used to be easier when Synaptic was the default package manager because you could enter linux as a search term to find and remove old kernel images and headers. But if you did not install Synaptic from Software Center, the Software Center itself is useless for finding and removing old kernels.

You can find which kernels you have installed to remove with sudo apt-get with

Code:

dpkg-query -l linux*

Some people have written scripts to remove all but several most recent kernels, but I do not have such a script.

I was able to remove the linux-header packages with Software Manager that I had effectively deleted from the command line once the apt-get was able to finish with the two packages and fix the package system.

I was mostly surprised that what was clearly showing as a free space problem in apt-get was being shown to be something entirely different in Software Manager and the Update Manager. And perhaps secondarily surprised that 1.2GB wasn't enough to install those two header packages. Maybe I should be reviewing my quota system. ;)